Oil-Water Flow Measurement for Custody Transfer Applications

W. Maru, S. Lakshmanan, N. Singh, A. Thomas

Abstract

In the Oil & Gas industry, the ownership or custody transfer (CT) of crude oil is measured using Flow Metering and Sampling. Flow Metering quantifies the total amount fluid while Sampling quantifies the fluid composition – for example, the water fraction and other compounds thereby correcting the Flow Metering for its Oil-Cut. Any small inaccuracies in sampling may result in the sale or purchase of expensive water – resulting in significant financial exposure, incorrect government taxations and consequently affecting our weekly shopping too. Worse still, the absence of periodic sampling and failure to detect some undesirable compounds such as (inorganic and organic) chlorides could be catastrophic – not only economically but also politically. Therefore, the central tenet in Sampling is the creation of homogeneous mixture in the pipeline so that accurate representative samples could be extracted. However, achieving a homogeneous mixture of oil and water - two fluids that don’t like to mix, is challenging. To that end, following current industry standards, OGM has developed the SmartMix® Sampling System and tested it using two flow loops of different sizes, the SMPFL and LMPFL. For prototype development at the University of Cambridge, the SMPFL together with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to characterise the mixing profile. For industrial scale testing, the LMPFL together with Multiport Profile Proving (MPP) device is used to validate the performance and integrity of the technology. The test results achieved better than 97% mixing efficiency, significantly exceeding the 90% requirement stipulated by the current industry standards.

Download

IMEKO-TC9-2019-108.pdf

DOI

-

IMEKO TC

TC9 - Flow Measurement

Back to the proceedings